Dr Eve Ess

Eve’s work forms unstable connections between personal and historical details, embodied experience and emotional states of mind. Eve's oil paintings are materially led and stylistically variable. Maintained as storage devices, they are reorganised over time and used to generate associated imagery, objects, and texts.

Recent research explores the bodily and temporal distortions of 'looking after', particularly in relation to end-of-life care, observational drawing, and intergenerational confusion. Works from We die from the outside in are characterised by slippage and porosity across analogue and digital media, and modes of publication, from screen prints to sound works. Eve’s talk, Instants in Withdrawing, first delivered in 2023 for the Drawing Research Forum, Drawing Room, London, extends ideas around care, liveness, and labour from Because we love it so much, a script Eve wrote and performed for a Writing Residency with Contemporary Arts Membership Plymouth (CAMP), in 2020.

Eve is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for BA (Hons) Painting, Drawing, & Printmaking at Arts University Plymouth. Before joining Arts University Plymouth, Eve taught across Fine Art programmes at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, where she was MFA course leader for two years. As an artist educator, Eve has worked with organisations such as the Slade, Chisenhale Gallery, and Tate, contributing to the research project and book In Site of Conversation (Tate Publishing, 2017) which includes her writing on ((not-artist)) pedagogy. A PhD by practice in Painting at the Royal College of Art 2009-14 took Dora Maar's drained copy of Weeping Woman (1937) as a guide to researching aposiopetic gestures and ambivalent modes of study, with reference to feminist lessons and psychoanalytic theory.